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‘Miss, what’s the point of sources?’ Helping Year 11 to understand the discipline
Teaching History article
Clare Bartington noticed that her students’ focus on the specific kinds of question used in examinations appeared to have undermined their understanding of how historians actually use sources. Instead of approaching the traces or ‘leftovers’ of the past as potential sources of evidence in relation to a particular question, her students believed...
‘Miss, what’s the point of sources?’ Helping Year 11 to understand the discipline
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Why history teachers should not be afraid to venture into the long eighteenth century
Teaching History article
As ardent advocates of eighteenth-century history, Rhian Fender and Stephen Ragdale were determined to ensure that the period found a secure place within their department’s Key Stage 3 curriculum. Given the extraordinary range of contrasts that epitomise the long eighteenth century, and only ten lessons within which to explore them,...
Why history teachers should not be afraid to venture into the long eighteenth century
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Broadening Year 7’s British history horizons with Welsh medieval sources
Teaching History article
Hiscox wanted to broaden her students’ understanding of the complexity of the British past, and developed an enquiry into the Norman Conquest of Wales to help achieve that aim. Hiscox reports her enquiry design and its outcomes, sharing how she broadened both content and the types of sources that students...
Broadening Year 7’s British history horizons with Welsh medieval sources
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‘But they just sit there’: using objects as material culture with Year 8
Teaching History article
Having specialised in the history of material culture during her degree, Gabriella West was struck by the dismissive attitude of her pupils towards the study of material objects from the past. She therefore set out to find the perfect object through which to induct her Year 8 pupils into the history...
‘But they just sit there’: using objects as material culture with Year 8
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Imagining cities: exploring historical sites as contested spaces
Teaching History article
Geraint Brown and Matt Stanford share the daunting challenge and intriguing opportunities that are presented by leading a school history trip to a site as complex as Berlin. That the city is a palimpsest, layered with stories and tissued with conflicting identities, experiences and meanings, makes planning a trip extremely...
Imagining cities: exploring historical sites as contested spaces
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Cunning Plan 192: A suggested itinerary for visiting Berlin
Teaching History feature
The principles and approaches outlined in our article on Pages 59 to 64 of this edition can be applied to any site, although not necessarily all on the same trip! If you are visiting Berlin, and you want to examine it as a contested space, in what order might you...
Cunning Plan 192: A suggested itinerary for visiting Berlin
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Broadening horizons: using cross-curricular conversations to support historical understanding
Teaching History article
Bettney and Ridley focus on the context in which we teach and in which our students learn and on history in the context of the whole school curriculum and in relation to education about personal development. Taking the example of learning about parliament, they explore how the history curriculum and the...
Broadening horizons: using cross-curricular conversations to support historical understanding
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Move Me On 192: analytical focus with diverse histories
Teaching History feature
Move Me On is designed to build critical, informed debate about the character of teacher training, teacher education and professional development. It is also designed to offer practical help to all involved in training new history teachers. Each issue presents a situation in initial teacher education/training with an emphasis upon...
Move Me On 192: analytical focus with diverse histories
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Developing KS3 students’ ability to challenge their history curriculum through an early introduction of significance
Teaching History article
Offered five weeks to teach ‘whatever he wanted’ to Year 7, Andrew Slater decided that he wished to tackle the concept of significance head-on early in his students’ time in his school. He chose the expectedly unfamiliar substantive content of the Khmer Empire, challenging his students to justify the significance of...
Developing KS3 students’ ability to challenge their history curriculum through an early introduction of significance
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Bringing historical method into the classroom
Teaching History article
Shortly before their final A-level examination, Peter Turner was alarmed to discover some fundamental weaknesses in his Year 13 students’ understanding of the nature of historical interpretations. Determined to address this concern at a much earlier point with his next cohort of students he developed a new six-lesson enquiry. His...
Bringing historical method into the classroom
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Communities of inquiry: creating the conditions for meaningful collaboration
Teaching History article
When Will Bailey-Watson (a history ITE tutor) and Charlie Crouch (a history PhD student) worked together to improve a history undergraduate course at their university, they realised that the benefits of collaboration between teachers and historians can flow both ways. In this article they offer an account of how they sought...
Communities of inquiry: creating the conditions for meaningful collaboration
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Three strategies to support pupils’ study of historical significance
Teaching History article
When Paula Worth met with history-teaching colleagues to explore how they could improve their teaching about historical significance, she found that she was far from alone in finding the process a daunting one. Prompted to investigate the difficulties she had encountered, Worth realised that that she had previously reached for...
Three strategies to support pupils’ study of historical significance
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Using eighteenth-century material culture to develop evidential thinking in Year 8
Teaching History article
It seems that teapots really can talk. Eleanor Dimond took her undergraduate experience of studying material culture into the classroom, with startling results. Historians of material culture have developed distinctive evidential methods which, in stark contrast to typical GCSE and A-Level approaches, see a strong interplay between analysis of the physical attributes...
Using eighteenth-century material culture to develop evidential thinking in Year 8
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What Have Historians Been Arguing About... gender and sexuality
Teaching History feature
Although they overlap, gender and sexuality are each a distinctive field of historical research. Researching in these fields involves cross-disciplinary work and a range of media and methods. One of the greatest challenges is that of terminology: how to refer to the gender identity or sexuality of a subject in...
What Have Historians Been Arguing About... gender and sexuality
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Practical demonstration: powerful and rigorous history teaching for all
Teaching History article
In this article, Ian Luff returns to the theme of ‘practical demonstration’ which he developed in three articles twenty years ago. Luff restates his original rationale for the enduring power of the approach, advances some new reasons why history teachers should give serious attention to it and shares several practical examples...
Practical demonstration: powerful and rigorous history teaching for all
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Exploring the relationship between historical significance and historical interpretation
Teaching History article
Jane Card’s previous work on the power of images in conveying particular interpretations and her advice about how to use visual material effectively in classrooms will be familiar to readers of Teaching History. In this article she focuses specifically on the capacity of visual representations to convey a compelling message about the...
Exploring the relationship between historical significance and historical interpretation
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Cunning Plan 191: diving deep into ‘history from below’ with Year 8
Article
Can the ‘subaltern’ speak, Year 8s?
When the Indian scholar and literary theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak asked this question in 1988, she wasn’t asking Year 8s on a Monday morning. What she wanted to explore was whether those marginalised people written out of the archive – ‘the subaltern’ – could...
Cunning Plan 191: diving deep into ‘history from below’ with Year 8
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Decolonising sources: helping Year 9 pupils critically evaluate colonial sources
Teaching History article
Danielle Donaldson’s history department was already working within a professional culture that sought opportunities for making the history curriculum diverse and representative. Responding to wider debates within and beyond the history education community, however, the department began to ask fresh questions about what it meant to decolonise a curriculum. Donaldson...
Decolonising sources: helping Year 9 pupils critically evaluate colonial sources
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Managing the scope of study
Teaching History article
Anna Dickson and her department sought a solution to the challenges posed to their pupils by the expanded curricular scope of the new GCSE. In particular, they wanted to address the difficulties their pupils experienced in understanding the Cold War. Dickson outlines here how she drew on the work of...
Managing the scope of study
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Teaching History 191: Material Worlds
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
03 Editorial (Read article)
04 HA Secondary News
06 HA Update
06 Illumination or illustration? Using eighteenth-century material culture to develop evidential thinking in Year 8 – Eleanor Dimond (Read article)
18 Fifties Britain through the senses: ‘never had it so good’? Evaluating social change and continuity in post-war Britain...
Teaching History 191: Material Worlds
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Thinking about the ethical dimension
Teaching History article
Responding to concerns about Dutch students’ citizenship education, Tim Huijgen, Paul Holthuis, Roel Nijmeijer and Iris van den Brand set out to design online materials to help students understand the decisions and dilemmas faced by past actors. They focused on the life and actions of Rosie Glaser (1914–2000), a Dutch Holocaust survivor,...
Thinking about the ethical dimension
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‘Its ultimate pattern was greater than its parts’
Teaching History journal article
Identifying the challenges his students faced both with recall and analysis of the content they had learned for their GCSE course, Ed Durbin devised a solution which focused not on exam skills and revision lessons, but on using Key Stage 3 to build the ‘hinterland’ of contextual knowledge and causal...
‘Its ultimate pattern was greater than its parts’
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Investigating ‘sense of place’ with Year 9 pupils
Teaching History article
Confined to his home during lockdown in 2020, teacher Josh Mellor became eager to explore the history of the physical environment on his doorstep. After reading about different approaches to using environmental history in the classroom, Mellor decided to design an enquiry to explore the changing landscape of the Fens in...
Investigating ‘sense of place’ with Year 9 pupils
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Telling difficult stories about the creation of Bangladesh
Teaching History article
Nathanael Davies recognised that previous efforts to diversify the history taught at his school by weaving new stories into the curriculum had made little impression on his students’ assumptions about what really counted as history. Planning a new enquiry on the creation of Bangladesh was intended both to bridge a...
Telling difficult stories about the creation of Bangladesh
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Integrating the historical Holocaust
Teaching History article
How can we help students understand the Holocaust in its full historical complexity, particularly when they often come to class with misconceptions arising from the representation of the Holocaust in popular culture? Over a three-year period, Sam Ineson set out to integrate the historical Holocaust into his school’s formal and informal...
Integrating the historical Holocaust